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Comment by nkcmr | Hacker News Reader

So, I should upload a picture of my face to some random website/app to let it do something silly with my face and just let them have a picture of my face?

Didn’t the FaceApp incident _just_ happen? What’s the privacy policy for this website?

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> Didn’t the FaceApp incident _just_ happen?

There was no “incident”. Some people read the terms of service and raised a kerfuffle over it because the devs are based in Russia. So far we have no knowledge nor reasonable suspicions of anything nefarious on their part.

Friendly warning: people can see your face when you leave the house.

Yeah, but it's not like myriad cameras are recording their face and storing it for posterity whenever they leave the house! /s

Depends on where you live. Where I live, I know for a fact they have less than 1TB of storage for 1000 cameras, and law enforcement usually fights the city to get images of incidents, because they don't live over a day due to storage shortage.

Let me tell you a story from about 10 years ago. I was working for the DOJ and was invited to one of their secure datacenter (I was cleared). As we are walking through hallways, we sometimes had to cross through rooms of racks of servers to get to other server rooms. As we walked through past these racks of servers, I noticed they all said EMC on the cages. My coworker points out each room we walk through is housing storage and measuring a single server room alone, you'd find they were pushing a few petabytes. Just imagine what their storage solution looks like now. Thats just the DOJ.

Another story.. 15 years ago, not many people had a digital camera. Almost overnight, everyone and their mom had a digital camera. My dog has a camera.

If you think your image is not captured and stored somewhere for a near indefinite period of time, then you are just fooling yourself. 1984 came and went and we didn't even notice we're living a brave new world now

I can simultaneously believe both you and dr_zoidberg, just as I can believe the homophobic totalitarian dictatorships of the Soviet Union were simultaneous with the 60s summer of love and Denmark decriminalising all pornography. They did say it “depends on where you live”.

While I think this is great for generally alleviating the creepiness of surveillance while keeping the benefits, why do they have such little storage? I'd have thought storing it would be the easy part compared to maintaining the whole systems.

In London they are. I assume you don't live there?

You can just try it with this: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

Just upload a picture of your dog. Pretty soon the tech will be good enough to identify you by your dog.

The "Who" tells you it's MIT folk; the confirmation message tells you the image will be immediately deleted.

The information (if you trust it) is clearly there on the website.

The "how" link in the top-right corner says:

Your photos are sent to our servers to generate portraits. We won’t use data from your photos for any other purpose and we'll immediately delete them.

So basically you have to trust them.

But then the page has a ton of photos (presumably submitted by users) that I can download. So perhaps the original photo isn't used and deleted, but the generated photo belongs to them.

I just uploaded a picture of nicolas cage.

What FaceApp incident?

There wasn't really an "incident".

Someone bothered to read the terms of service and noticed that they stated that you grant the app, the app's creator, and anyone else the app's creators chose, can do what-ever they like, when-ever they like, as often as they like, for as long as they like, with your photos and any other data they scrape from you as you use the app. This cause a bit of a stir, despite being pretty much what any similar ToS says.

And apparently the app creators are based in Russia which cased further concern to some.

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